Intended Meaning
Shahrur maintains that God’s testimony is not like human testimony, which is limited to direct seeing or to being present in a particular place, but rather is a testimony grounded in an encompassing, immediate, and scientific awareness of all existence. God bears witness because He encompasses everything that exists, not because He sees it from a partial angle.
The Atom’s Structure in the Atlas
- Type of argument: interpretive
- Argument movement: making God’s testimony an encompassing, immediate, and scientific awareness rather than partial seeing.
- Key terms: God’s testimony, immediate, encompassing, existence, scientific.
- Degree of centrality: pivotal.
This shifts divine testimony from the model of limited human testimony to the model of encompassing awareness, thereby elevating the meaning of testimony from partial presence to all-encompassing knowledge that is not bounded by place or direction.
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Basis
- Supporting text: “His testimony is not like human testimony; rather, it is an immediate and scientific encompassing of existence.”
Basis Location in the Book
- Book: Islam and Faith.
- Location: in the middle section of the book
- Type of basis: close evidence.
- Marker that helps verification: immediate testimony
- Reading note: this passage is suitable as evidence because it explains divine testimony as immediate knowledge, not as human testimony.
Degree of Documentation
- Level: directly documented
- Meaning of the level: the atom relies on an explicit witness close to the wording of the claim.
- Limits of the reading: the formulation above is an analytical summary and should not be treated as a verbatim quotation unless the witness is quoted textually.
Its Function in the Book
Its function here is declarative; it establishes a result on which what follows in the argument depends.
Editorial Note
This atom serves to fix the distinction between God’s knowledge and human knowledge.